All posts by outlaw

I’m sure the more astute followers of ocean races have noticed that leaderboards are a poor way of judging positions in a race. Here I will outline why, how there is no fail-safe method and how I approach the problem vs my competitors.

In the last chapter I’ve explained my approach to VMC-sailing, now let’s poke some holes into it. I do believe that a constant VMC target is the optimum solution for wind changing over time. That however leaves one mortal flaw: wind changes over space!

Hitting islands is an easy and entirely too common way to ruin your race. The best SOLers do it once in a while. And of course there was the much talked about Vestas grounding. So how do we avoid this?

First off, no, Team Vestas were not taking any ‘risks’. To hit a fairly wide reef right in the middle, they had to be blissfully unaware of the obstacle.

Today I’ll put things in practice and route the Capetown – Abu Dabi race. As a handicap, I will only work with the COGOW prevailing winds charts. I have not run a software route of this course since May.

Here I’m going to outline the fundamental principles how I tackle WX routing. Honestly my approach is entirely intuition (or software of course), so I don’t have a strict formal way… but the basics are very true.

This was spawned off the ‘sailors with routers’ debate, I will try to create a comprehensive guide of what goes into a successful SOL race.
I will start with a review of fundamental routing strategies. Explaining VMC and it’s applications is going to be the meat of this guide.